Friday, August 27, 2010

As a kid the fall always simultaneously spelled impending doom and incredible delight. On the one hand I had to contend with the coming school year, always a consistent cause for mourning. But on the other hand, the coming of school meant the coming of fall, and the coming of fall meant none other than the coming of football.

Ten years out of high school and yet still in school, things don't seem to have changed much except for one simple fact. School is now year round, and I've passed the point of hoping for it ever to end. So that means that all fall really brings is football, and that means celebration for all.

Well, one other new thing this fall is that along with the football season is the inaugural year of tXtFL seasons. I realized that just as most games have some sort of endpoint—a quest accomplished, a task achieved, a nation saved—so also tXtFL needs a tangible goal. The latest alpha builds feature this progression through seasons marching relentlessly toward playoffs and the final challenge, the tXtFL Bowl. Alas, those alpha builds stop precipitously at the end of a season, but I've just checked in some new code featuring the first round of playoffs. More to follow! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy another round of preseason progress tonight.

Notable Quotable

"This club with a shortage of ego and an excess of character ascended to baseball's throne in the way it preferred, with a collaborative performance." (Chris Haft, on the San Francisco Giants' 2012 World Series victory)

"In a society that craves results now, in a world that demands excellence every day, head coaches rarely are allowed the time they need to grow into the job and master it. Reminders of it come every year at this time. Head coaches are fired, head coaches are hired and the coaching carousel spins without producing in the ways NFL owners had hoped." (Adam Shefter, on the "coaching carousel" of rapid coaching firing/hiring after the season)

"A perennial danger among contemporary students of the New Testament is to overlook the two-thousand-year history of debate and interpretation generated by these twenty-seven books. The pressure to be up-to-date with the voluminous contemporary literature, combined with the penchant endemic to twenty-first-century Western culture to revere the innovative, even the faddish, and be suspicious of the traditional, conspires to blind us to our connections with twenty centuries of Christian readers." (Carson DA & Moo DJ, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 31)